Might Breast Milk Have HIV Antibodies?

I read the most interesting piece yesterday about how researchers are thinking that a mother’s breast milk may actually contain a piece of the puzzle when it comes to finding out how to successfully kill or halt the virus that causes AIDS, HIV, to stop spreading.

While it is known that there are cases where HIV is spread to an infant from their mother, there are a lot of times when an infant does not get the virus when it’s been fed the breast milk repeatedly. I don’t know how they know that and I certainly would hope that a mother who knowingly has HIV wouldn’t be feeding her child her breast milk.

The point here is that researchers never thought much of it until they started digging and found that the key may be in the breast milk itself and its chemical makeup. They are hopeful that there is some sort of special compound of antibody in a mother’s breast milk that might fend off the dangerous virus.

This is obviously exciting because we could take something that occurs in nature and possibly isolate it into a medication for those that suffer from HIV. If scientists could find out the reasons why the breast milk seems to have protective powers against this insidious virus, they could really come up with a unique treatment or even vaccination that doesn’t have side effects possibly (as long as they don’t use those dangerous preservatives in them!)